Content available:
980 hours, 13 minutes
in 3142 files
May 4, 2018
BTW, please read past all the spelling errors in the descriptions of the various programs. I did those on the fly as I listened to the tapes without a spell checker and will, at some point, go back through them and make some corrections.
April 28, 2018
I made it to then end and just posted the final reels. By my count there are 561 reels. This includes some boxes that were empty along with a couple of empty reels. I didn't make it to 600 but, as I wrote elsewhere, that was a guess based on a quick count of the many boxes I brought home.
As the counter on the left indicates, there are over 980 hours of content online now as part of this project. I have no idea how much there would be had I included all the copyrighted material but it would be substantial. The mp3s I did put online amount to 13.5 gigabytes.
I hope you enjoy going through this material as much as I have in the past year putting it all together.
January 28, 2018
I just posted Reel 300 which means that I have made it to the half-way point of this project. Are their really 600 reels? We'll see. That was a rough count I made when I stared at all those boxes way back a dozen years ago. Stick around to see what the second half brings us.
January 27, 2018
As I transfer reels 290 and up, I am pretty sure I am at the end of "Jim's tapes." Of course I have thought this before only to turn up several more, but, from the way I've sorted the remaining boxes, this might be it. The next bunch of reels contain music copied from LPs or dubbed from other tapes so I won't be posting the contents due to copyright restrictions. Also, any newer off-the-air recordings I will, likely, be limiting to samples for the same reason.
December 26, 2017
I added a few features to the site. There is now a date search tool. There are also two new reporting tools. One lists all the recording titles and the other shows how many dated recordings exist by year. When doing a search by term(s) the result will now show the total play time for the results.
December 17, 2017
Work on the project is progressing nicely. As I write this I have just gone over 700 hours of content.
I did add a feature that allows the downloading of each reel's content as a zip file.
I am nearing the end of the acetate-based reels, I think. I tried to sort them all into one group since they would likely be the oldest recordings. I may have about 20 left. What remains are pre-recorded reels of music and many reels that the labels indicate are copies of phonograph records. All that copyrighted material will be noted but I won't be putting anything online but excerpts of what I find.
I need to go back through the reel descriptions and pull out content for the Highlights page. I still need to go back and make zip files out of the earlier reels.
June 5, 2017
Dang!!! After going through 25 reels I discovered a problem. A big one.
I do listen to these recording once I have them digitized but I will admit, I do not listen to every second of everything I find. However, I did notice that there were some dropouts occuring, usually after about 50 minutes of recording time. There would be a word or two missing and then, as the recording ran longer, there would be entire paragraphs missing.
The problem has been traced to my MacBook Pro. I am using Audacity for my recording software and the problem seems to be the way the Mac writes a file as it records it. In Windows the file is written continuously but on the Mac they are written in blocks. I think that the Mac does its writing and while doing so misses a bunch of content.
Until this is resolved, I will go back to using my old XP computer for recording. The only downside to that is that it is SLOW compared to the Mac when I need to do a speed change to a recording. I'll live with that or move the file to the Mac when that needs to be done.
I am going to go back a redo Reels 024 and 025 since I think the content was local and important enough to get it right. If someone reading this really wants to hear Reels 001 through 023 without the drop outs, let me know and I'll fix them. For now, redoing them is on the back burner.